Jeffrey Wasserstrom
speaker
385 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Jeffrey Wasserstrom’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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But it's not specifically about China. And so censorship is most restrictive when it's things that are actually about China. Things about leaders of the Chinese Communist Party, there's intense kind of censorship of that and certain events in that way. But a sort of like
something through allegory, something through imagining a place that looks a lot like a communist party ruled state so that people are going to read it. There were things that were banned throughout, up until like the very last period of Gorbachev's rule, bad things banned in the Soviet Union that are available in Chinese bookstores. You can buy 1984 in a Chinese bookstore.
You've been able to since 1985. You can buy, again, it's not about China. And actually for some people within China in the mid 1980s, where they focused on the part of 1984, that's like the two minutes of hate, these rituals of denunciation of people. For some people in China, it seemed like it was about their past, not about their present.
And then by the 90s, 1984 is a very bleak culture of scarcity, a place where people just aren't having fun. And people said, like, you could read, some people would read 1984 and say, look, this is the world we're living in. It's a big brother state. But others said, well, that has some similarities to us, but... you know, he wasn't talking about a country like ours.
Look, we've got supermarkets, we've got McDonald's. I mean, this is not, you know, we've got fast trains. We got things are, we're living so much better in some ways than our grandparents did. And this isn't like that bleak world he was imagining.
There are mixed elements. I think there are moments when it can seem more one than the other. And there can be parts of the same country that seem more one than the other. And if we just think about control through distraction and...
playing to your sense of pleasure and one thing that people forget sometimes or don't know is that Aldous Huxley who wrote Brave New World taught Eric Blair who became George Orwell when he was a student at Eden and they were sort of rivals and in fact in 1949 Orwell sent his former teacher a copy of 1984 and said, you know, look, I've written this.
Basically, it's kind of almost a little Oedipal, like, I've written this book that displaces yours. He didn't say that. He just said, I want you to have this. But he had criticized Brave New World and reviews as like... not having imagined a world of capitalism run wild like before, realizing the kind of totalitarian threats of the middle of the 20th century.
But Huxley wrote Orwell a letter in October of 1949, same month the Communist Party took control in China, not that he mentions China. And he just said, you know, it's a great book and everything, but I think the dictators of the future will find less arduous ways to keep control over the population. Basically saying more like what was in my book than in yours.
Oh, and the dissection of language is just so amazing. No, I think you've got a point there. And I went back and reread Brave New World, and it's fascinating, but it's very messy. I think there's a clarity to Orwell's 1984. There's a clarity to Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale, similarly, the construction of the elements. And she was a big fan of both. 1984 and Brave New World.
So there's a way they go forward. But, you know, there was a kind of, it's not exactly a sequel, but Huxley did write something called Brave New World Revisited.
He says that in Mao's China, they're kind of combining the two things of this. And I'm really fascinated by that because they published in China on the Chinese mainland. It was published in Taiwan and Hong Kong, too. It's called the Dystopian Trilogy. And it's a box set where you have Zemiaten's We, that inspired both Orwell and Huxley to some extent. That's one book.
And then there's Animal Farm in 1984. It's the second book. And then the third volume is Huxley's Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited. And it was published in Complex Characters. You could buy it in Hong Kong. But I compared it to the book you can buy on the mainland. And it's all the same, except the parts in Brave New World Revisited that refer to China are scalpeled out.
And this, I think, shows the subtlety of the censorship system. You can buy these books and you can read about them, but the parts that really show you how to connect the dots, that gets taken out.
And I do think the Brave New World side of things, I think with China, I was feeling it was definitely moving more toward Brave New World, except Tibet and Xinjiang being more the crude boot-on-the-face 1984 style of control. But then during the COVID lockdowns, when people were being so intensely monitored and controlled...
Even places like Shanghai, that it seemed much more the Brave New World kind of style, had their Orwellian moment. So you have it now, I think it's, you know, there are more 1984, more Brave New World parts of the country, and there are also more Brave New World, more 1984 moments.
Yeah. And I think it's one of these really good examples of how China's distinctive, but it's not unique. You have other settings where you have these no-go zones that you learn. And one example is in Singapore. So National University of Singapore has a world-class history department. But no Singapore historian in it. Nobody who focuses on the history of Singapore.
Because, you know, it's incredibly wide-ranging what you can do, analyze. But when you're actually talking about the family that's been most powerful in Singapore, then it gets... to be touchy. In Thailand, which I've been working on recently, you have these lese-majeste laws that make it very, very dangerous to say certain kinds of things about the king.
And so in all of these settings, you have to figure out ways to work around it. There's there's a way in which you can say at the international, the foreign correspondence clubs in different parts of Asia, you can have an event that's about the country won over that you can say basically anything you want, but when it gets to the things in the place where you are, it's touchy.
I should give credit for that insight. Shivani Matani, who's written, co-wrote a very good book on Hong Kong, Among the Braves, She was talking about that, that in Singapore, at the Foreign Correspondence Club, you could have an event on Hong Kong that could say all kinds of things that you couldn't say at the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondence Club.
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